It was so bad, I’m at home at 11:49 on a Wednesday I don’t want to be one of those people who take mental health days. But I guess that’s what I’m doing. I just couldn’t do it, again so suddenly after we just had such a disturbing blowout of a fight on July 20th. I couldn’t sit at my desk and listen to my coworkers talk about their wedding planning and engagement parties and summer vacations. I just couldn’t do it again. Not to mention, like I’ve written about in the past, there is a lot of physical pain that accompanies mental anguish. Last night, my head hurt so much and I was hyperventilating so much I thought I was going to pass out. No one who hasn’t done it knows, but it really, really hurts to crack something out of a reserve you’ve carried around in your mind for over twenty years.

How did this all happen?

My husband has been rather under-achieving in the job acquisition department. I’d feel sorrier for him/more hopeless about the situation in general, but he’s really not trying all that much. Like I feel like if he scoured Indeed every day or every other day and blanket applied (as I did) he would get SOMETHING. But, he has been doing well at not smoking weed. I still do, of course. After our wedding night the two of us were sober (except for weed) for three months. Then, I got irritated at how unjust this was for me. Why do I have to stop drinking because he’s a raging alcoholic? The same thinking dominated my attitude towards smoking weed this most recent job-hunting go around. And he still has to go get it for me..because…yeah I have never bought drugs on my own. Before I knew my husband a coworker or friend would hook me up. So yesterday he bought a new strain, and made some remark that he wanted me to save the remaining large bud of our last strain.
Which, all right, I’ll admit it, fucking triggered me. I spend the vast majority of my free time cleaning OUR house. I’ve spent whole PTO days (like today) cleaning and organizing rooms he’s just going to trash again. He’s just a slob, there’s no fixing it, he can’t take care of anything but then he has to cling to the shitty, tattered scraps of what he’s ruined rather than deal with the emotional turmoil he feels when he gets rid of something. So he can’t seem to care for anything properly (cars, computers, spouses) but he also has to cling to everything because he’s imbued it with emotional meaning. Yes, I realize what I’m saying.
Looking back, I wonder if I just should’ve grinned-and-bear-it my way through. That’s how I got through my childhood. Sure, once I became a sullen teenager they all turned on me a little more, but fuck them, like I really want them in my life. My mom still has some emotional hold over me, but I guess that’s normal, to be attached to the far better of your two rather clueless, hurtful parents. Like her mother before her, I’m sure my mom was entirely unaware of how much damage she caused. But, you know I’m almost 30, maybe I shouldn’t just have to keep suffering in silence, to keep putting up with things for the sake of having these relationships with other humans.

And after last night, I don’t know, I have this heavy, sinking, internal feeling that if I tell you what happened you’re just going to be filled with appalled judgment that I’m even still here.

Because, okay, we started getting into it concerning the tiny weed scrap he wanted me to keep. Yes, I could’ve just been like *huge cheesy smile* “OKAY HONEY!” Because that’s how his mom acts like 70% of the time. The other 30% she’s being emotionally manipulative, like all mothers are. But I got irritated about it. Maybe because I feel like I have to dedicate all of my spare time battling the mountains of junk and clutter and just grossness he leaves lying around because God forbid he clean up after himself, I only learned to when I was a child. Maybe because there are already so many things that I have to pretend aren’t big deals, why do I have to let this go too? Why do I always just have to grit my teeth and take it? I’m entirely tired of that.

So now what.

Because the argument about the weed came to an abrupt and not-final halt when my husband went to the living room and I continued cooking dinner, which needed to be monitored constantly. He came into the kitchen and ate (because now we can finally eat in our kitchen! Not having a choice from eating every meal on your couch sucks and it makes your living room gross) but the only thing he said to me the entire meal was to compliment the food. Which he pretty much always does. Then he got up and let his plate by the sink and went into the living room. This was like 7:20 last night and he’d planned on going to a 8 o’clock AA meeting.
But then I got up and abruptly went into our bedroom to lie down. I don’t know why, other than I didn’t want to keep eating, and I didn’t want to go sit next to my husband on our couch.
Then he came into the room, I thought to change for his meeting, but he lied down next to me and tried to tell me the same exact things he was telling me before. That I was making him feel bad about himself, that I was putting him down and making cutting remarks, that I was invalidating his feelings, that I wasn’t respecting him. The usual things he says that I do.

I don’t know if I do them. Those all sound EXACTLY like things my dad would do to my mom. So there’s that horrifying idea.

But, you know how I know that I wouldn’t get to irritated or angered by things if I wasn’t at my base state walking around an agitated person? I mean I know it’s not my fault that I’m fucked, but fucked I still am, and I’ve just been trying to be normal (and by normal I mean so wealthy I can buy my problems out of existence, and before you say that’s not possible, UH in the case of my mom it certainly is possible, also do you not have 90K in student loan debt that gets BIGGER every year, despite 24 on-time monthly payments per year? so yeah, normal means happily married, maybe with kids, and getting to see my mom…but….how else could I fix all that, unless I was able to buy my mom her own car, they share one, and her own place to live?) this whole time, but it never seems to go well. Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like if I’d been lower on the attractiveness scale. There’s this perfect zenith of done up, right before it starts its RAPID decline, where people will be nicest to you. I’m not even remotely joking, I experimented with it all the time at college.

So, then we really got into it. I left the bedroom in a hurry, and then we just started getting really bad with each other. I went first. At the end of my tirade I brought up how it’d been less than two weeks since I caught him cheating, something I never thought he’d do, and with a gross, gross, just gross stranger, like one step above a $40 hooker gross. Just egh. Anyway, I found about that on July 20th….yet yesterday when my irrational irritation over something seemed to hurt his feelings…my husband just flipped out.

Because he said I was making him hate himself, that whenever he tried to talk to me about his feelings, I always turned it around on him and made him hate himself in the process.

He had this habit of punching himself REALLY hard in the head when we first met, whenever he was very angered or upset, and it’d subsided a great deal. But then, like I said when I thoroughly described our wedding night, he certainly brought out the I’m-going-to-hurt-myself idea MANY times, he would not stop saying the phrase “I’LL SLIT MY FUCKING THROAT, I DON’T CARE” just so many times. It’s hard to still wanna fuck the person attached to the same face that you saw screaming that at you, still in the tux he married you in earlier that same day. But if I told him that, he’d probably just threaten suicide. Because that’s what he ended up doing last night.

He couldn’t handle that I was being so harmful (as described above) and that I brought up the fact that he was caught cheating less than two weeks ago, so maybe cut me a little slack? I also may have asked him “This is the best I get, really? This is you at your absolute best?” Which, is bad, I guess.

So then, he moved from being standing in front of me in our living room, to sitting on the floor in front of our coffee table, and he must’ve slammed his forehead into the coffee table about 3 to 5 times, then he stood and charged right for me. I truly thought he was about to attack me, but he didn’t, he stopped about a foot in front of me, all in my face just like my dad liked getting. He said something along the lines “If this doesn’t stop, I will fucking end it, I don’t care.” And he wasn’t talking about divorce, that really wouldn’t have been all that scary. Then, all of a sudden he had to leave. He had on shorts and shoes, but no shirt and he grabbed his wallet and keys. I was able to convince him not to go. Not that I give two fucks if our neighbors see, but what if he got into a car accident or altercation in his highly agitated state? We sure as fuck don’t have bail money or new car money, or even car repair money. Then he went off on a REALLY bad tirade.

He talked about how he wants to kill everyone who works at the doctor’s office he went to, because I guess he talked to like four different people to make sure the bill wouldn’t get sent here, but it still got sent here. Almost like a sign. He says he hates them so much for making me go through this and feel this way…but like…c’mon. He hates them for outing him. He hates them for being the reason I caught him. HE’S the one who made me feel that way and go through that. I remember a coworker from an old job cheated on his long suffering girlfriend and got the other girl pregnant, so he had to ask his mom for the abortion money. He was telling me he was so worried his girlfriend would find out, and it would hurt her so much. I remember thinking, if you cared enough about her feelings it wouldn’t have happened in the first place…you see that right, dumb dipshit who decided to fuck what he wanted and is now somehow making it into something he’s protecting his cheated-on significant other from?

He talked about how everything he’s done in the past eight years we’ve been dating has been trying to get me to want to have sex with him. And yes, sex has pretty much always been a problem for us. He’s basically always been unsatisfied with our sex life, has always wanted more and wanted me to be much more into it. I don’t know what my problem is, because boy do I love weird, degrading sex. And that doesn’t at all flow with having sex with someone you truly love. There was one guy I had really good sex with, who I really, really liked, but I think I knew even on a conscious level that he would never feel the same about me, so I was like…intent on being some great memory, and hoping beyond hope I was wrong when I knew I wasn’t. I was also 20 years old so give me a break.

He talked about how he was one of the defective people, how he was one of those products that quality control would toss into the scrap bin. Just a really dark, bleak outlook on himself. And I know something about dark, bleak outlooks.

And like…am I somehow making him feel this way about himself? HOW?! I mean, I’ve tried telling him it’s not his fault I have sex issues…but I can imagine I’m not very good at it in person, there’s a lot I’m capable of writing only, to strangers. Whom I appreciate more than you could ever know.

I feel like he’s actively giving into despair. I feel like he’s getting caught in a loser cycle. Because that’s what really does underachievers in, it’s so easy to fall into the mental battles that all losers have. Like, every loser I know has a “no one appreciate what I do, so I just won’t do anything” approach to their actions. Which infuriates someone like me, because you should do things because they need to be done, not because someone might praise or reward you. Every loser I know thinks poorly of themselves, which affects their interpersonal relationships and their interactions with others, which makes them think even worse of themselves, and on and on we go.

I just feel like he’s not trying enough, and if he did he’d probably get a better job, and feel better about himself.

And like as far as sex goes…I don’t know what to tell him, I guess I’m not at all ready, not since we had sex twice between the cheating and the getting caught. Like…no. The idea of doing that is so weird to me right now. I guess I don’t know why that is, other than I know I don’t want to. When he was profusely apologizing via text the day after I found out, he said getting to fall asleep holding me meant so much more to him than sex, but last night that didn’t seem to be the case.

But, after talking and talking and crying and crying in a really hoarse voice for quite awhile, I managed to calm him down a little. I remember that feeling from when I was a young kid. When genuine terror takes over, when you really, truly believe something irrevocable is about to happen, I don’t know how to describe it but you feel really still. I remember noticing that I hadn’t moved or felt my hands the entire time he was freaking out, saying all the stuff I just told you about. But he eventually sat on the edge of our couch and didn’t say anything for a long, long time. So in that time, I started to calm down, and then the true sadness of the event settled in.

Because I feel, I genuinely believe, that even if I was being an obnoxious cunt about not wanting to save yet another bud of weed that will more than likely just be forgotten then lost, HOW did it come to that? To him bashing his head against a table then threatening suicide. Later on he would tell me he was about ready to walk away from this marriage if things didn’t change. And I’m like…does he really get to say that right now? Has he just subconsciously been dying to be the one to say that to the other? He told me he didn’t know how to hurt or punish himself to make cheating up to me. I don’t understand why it’s a given that I want him to hurt himself. Like I feel like he’s taking a lifetime of negativity from others, and he’s taking it ALL out on me. Because he just takes it from everyone else, then I guess that coupled with my never really having been into sex with him….that just made him crazy. To him. That’s his explanation to himself, I’m sure. That’s kind of what he said last night, in many, many more words.

SO now what? As if things weren’t bad enough, they get worse.

You know, you are almost forced to believe in a deity, when your life feels so perfectly orchestrated for despair.

And last night, after he’d finished hoarse-yelling, and hadn’t spoken in awhile, I said I had to clean up the kitchen and went to do so. He heard me crying, it’s a small house. He hugged me as I stood trying to clean the stove, but I was mostly crying. He was crying too of course. He seemed to realize his grave mistake as I got worse and worse, with the crying. Because the more I thought about it, the more I realized how scary this all was. And why does EVERYTHING have to be scary? Why does everything end up bad or wrong or hurt or scared? What the fuck am I doing to cause men like this to be in my life? What do I do now?

My mom would bring up suicide.

She has a very depressive personality, and my unbearably negative father is no help, to be sure. I remember one time, quite distinctly, we were going on a bike ride, something that only happened a handful of times. At one point I gave her my water bottle, and she said “I wish there was arsenic in it” before drinking some.

There were also a few other times, that my mother was so frazzled and so low and so down on herself and her life and so pushed to the edge by my father and brother and her mother all pulling her in different directions, that I truly, really believed that I was going to find her dead. She’d be an extra long time in the basement, and I’d think did she hang herself? She’d leave for an errand and not tell anyone (“Because no one cares!” she would say angrily when I asked why later on) and I would think is she driving to a bridge to jump off of? There’s one famous for that right by us. My brother (in 2011) threatened to jump off of it if my mom didn’t give him heroin money. True story. That was also the day she got home from the hospital from surgery, AND the first time I actually saw my dad slap the shit out of my brother. Yeah that’s another awesome memory. But anyway.

I feel like my mom doesn’t know how horrendously damaging so much of what she told me and said to me as a child was. She was constantly down on herself, making self-deprecating remarks. She was always telling me about her adult problems, because she didn’t have anyone else to talk to because one of my dad’s many goals was to keep us as isolated as possible. He did what he could to sabotage our friendships, that’s for certain. He just didn’t like other people in the house, possibly observing his abusive behavior, or maybe we would tell someone something….just can’t have that.

And the suicide threats…they came from him too. But with my dad, it was more a “I’m going to kill you and the kids and myself” sort of a vibe.

I can remember two very distinct times my dad threatened that very thing.

So. I guess you can say threatening to kill yourself is such a big trigger for me.

I think you can see why at this point.

So when I asked him why did he do that, why did he have to do stuff like that, why did he have to be scary? I never did things like that to him, no matter how bad things ever got with us, I never said I was going to maim or kill myself. Why are there so many things on the list of things he’s done to me that I’ve never done to him?

This is the point where I started to hyperventilate. I’ve cried like that many times before, but it’s always exhausting. Was my life just fucking meant to be frightening and sad? To what end? Maybe if I knew the meaning behind it I could bear it more. Wait, is that why people believe in deities? I told him that my mom would threaten to kill herself, that my dad would say he was going to kill all of us and himself (one time I know was when we were in the car, driving home from a rare vacation, because he always had to ruin everything, like not even exaggerating, he just could not let anyone, even himself, ever be happy, and that’s him).

I guess my husband didn’t know that. Maybe I hadn’t told him. I look back on what haunts me most and realize that there’s still a great deal my partner of eight years doesn’t know.

We ended up calming down after that, we even finished watching a movie we’d started the night before. He went to bed at the same time as me, which I found surprising. Then when I heard my alarm this morning, I just couldn’t deal with going in. I would’e called in the day after I found about his cheating, but it was a Friday and I need my paycheck, my work hands them out they don’t mail them. So I did today. My alarm went off at 5:30, I texted my boss at 5:50, and miraculously fell back asleep, and stayed asleep until nearly 11. My husband did too, he goes in at noon on Wednesdays.

We interacted before he left for work, he was being exceptionally courteous. I was at least responding to him, but it was quite clear I was still very upset. But I still put the bed skirt on myself, not easy feat with a king bed, made the bed and washed the dishes. I still straightened the living room and took a shower. Just because your life is utter shit doesn’t mean your surroundings must match, that’s what I always say.

And pretty much since that time, I’ve been writing this blog. I don’t even know why, it’s mortally embarrassing that it’s getting even worse than it was, and I said that the last time. Is that what all abused women say?

My head and my neck are killing me. I’m also aware the pot of coffee that’s been my sole nutrition thus far isn’t setting well. My plan for the next several hours is to eat a great deal then get incredibly drunk watching movies.

No one, especially not me, ever said I was healthy or knows what I’m doing. Half the time I don’t know why I feel the way I feel, so I can’t really be expected to know what’s best or how to be healthy or normal. I just kind of plan on going at things until I’m sick of them, that’s always been the plan. That and the writing. But for the past few years I’ve been banking on the idea that once we’re doing more than scraping by, my leisure time might be easier to come by.

The only time my life wasn’t riddled with these sorts of peaks and valleys of terrifying emotions, was when I was utterly alone. From 18 to 21, from when I left my parents’ to when I met my husband. Looking back, that wasn’t that long. It felt like an eternity though. I don’t know if I want to go back to that.